Texas Children’s receives 2015 Facility Maintenance Achievement Award

The organization was among eight award honorees selected from different categories by a panel of leaders in the maintenance and engineering profession. The award program recognizes the role maintenance and engineering departments play in the successful, cost-effective and energy-efficient operation of the nation’s institutional and commercial facilities.

This prestigious honor would not have been possible without the diligent efforts from members of our Facilities Operations Department who were collectively recognized for successfully implementing energy conservation practices that helped our organization reduce significant utility costs.

Despite the doubling in size of Texas Children’s facilities over the last seven years – from 2.7 million square feet in 2008 to 5 million square feet in 2015 – the utility budget increased by only 37 percent compared to an 85 percent increase in the size of our hospital’s physical footprint. The Facility Operations Department reduced the utility cost per square foot from $7.04 to $5.20 by optimizing the operation of mechanical and electrical equipment and using only operating funds – no capital funds were used.

Other successful energy cost measures implemented included:

Instituting accurate control of building chiller and hot water systems. Flows and temperatures of these resources are reset based upon space demand

Revising room ventilation schedules for more than 4,000 rooms to ensure compliance with current standards and increase comfort

Implementing occupied and unoccupied schedules where possible

Calibrating or replacing building automation system (BAS) control sensors to increase control accuracy of mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems

To monitor these complex systems and ensure the new operational settings are not compromised, Texas Children’s also implemented a daily, 24-hour manual override scorecard for the BAS. A daily measurement and validation scorecard was also developed to monitor the consumption of utilities. Each building’s score card shows how much chilled water, electricity and steam a building used the previous day and what the building should have used.

“We are so honored to receive this recognition for the third time in the award program’s six-year history,” said Texas Children’s Assistant Vice President of Facilities Operations Bert Gumeringer. “This is a testament of how hard our team works every day to ensure all of our hospital facilities are operating efficiently.”

Texas Children’s will be honored at the National Facilities Management and Technology Conference in Orlando in October.